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Don’t know how many times the point that SO isn’t an alert service has to be repeated. Yet I enter official trades at or better than official frequently, sometimes days after the official, and yes sometimes better pricing continues to get ‘better’, I know when to cut losses. Very often I will enter my own variant, sometimes works out better, sometimes not. For me the crux is that I’ve learnt more about how to trade independently without blowing the account here than anywhere else, with strategies that are intrinsically safe especially in difficult markets when my long positions suffer.. Most of us mere mortals have to start small, I appreciate that SO continues to use 1k trades as the starting trade size, doesn’t stop anyone from scaling. But it’s especially what I’ve learnt here that makes the service so valuable to me. SO is the most transparent service out there, hands down and it’s perpetually innovating strategies too. really I couldn’t ask for more. I hope everyone is enjoying their holidays, here’s to a new year with more understanding and less conflict. @t'pee

Of course there are plenty of managed funds, but your question was about SO, not just general funds. The link shows a list of trades where you could get a better pricing after the trade was entered, sometimes hours or the next day, which makes the timezone less critical. And the simple truth is that even if you executed only 30% of our trades, you would still do better than 99% of all traders and fund managers.. We teach people how to trade and become more independent on a continuous basis. But you need to be willing to learn. If you quit after few days/weeks, obviously you cannot learn. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink

Thanks Kim, I reached out to Lorintine Capital though they only work with accounts with $100k minimum. If anyone has an option though dont want to share publicly, just pm me. And there is plently of managed funds, not sure what the apprehention not just using a service if its through a licenced adivisor as there is many in the US? Maybe people in the Australia/Asia timezone can let me know how they go or what needs to be done to get the fills? With regards to "better pricing" you just added the search operator "better pricing" to the forum not a link to how people who cant trade in US market hours how this needs to be modified. Its great your an educational resource! Maybe you can give all of us in the non US timezones specific information on how to deal with this? Thanks

We have members from 45 countries, including Australia, Singapore, Japan, New Zeeland and more. They manage to trade and make good gains even from different time zones. But they treat SO as an educational resource and trading ideas generator, not an alert service. In most cases it is possible to get similar or better prices with some patience hours after the trade was posted or even the next day. Here is a list of topics where better pricing was available for entry, exit or both. What you are asking for is auto trading. We mentioned many times the risks of auto trading and why we won't do it, I recommend reading All You Need To Know About Auto-Trading But some people like to learn the hard way.. Maybe sticking around for more than just a few days would help to understand what SO is and what it isn't..

Over the years, I've seen a few disgruntled members where they've posted similar comments, but they all seem to share the same trait - they expect fills at the same price as the official trades AND be able to enter right around the same time as the official. It's the second part of that that is the real kicker and the reason we say to be patient with fills, especially with trades where T-0 is a few weeks away - and why we started tagging things with [BETTER PRICING] on both entry and exit to show how often that happens. I like to use another stock analogy for this matching of official pricing - when an analyst issues a stock upgrade causing the stock price to rise, is everyone going to be able to react to the upgrade and buy the stock at the same price? Of course not, and I don't think anyone would expect that to be the case, but with these option trades some people get very upset when the can't match prices. I understand that the amount of time members can spend on trading and trade analysis varies greatly. Many people have other jobs that require significant time away from trading (I was in that same boat for many years). But if your goal is to treat SO purely as an alert service then there is a much greater chance that you may be disappointed. As had been said many times by many members - those who get the most out of SO are those that learn the trades and make them their own by applying the techniques to their own personal trades. I thought it might be beneficial to say how I handle entry into official calendar trades. As Kim has mentioned, although we talk about some trades in advance, for the majority of both our official trades we enter them without specifically notifying each other in advance - so with the calendar trades I am in the same boat as everyone else: I find that I rarely enter calendar trades on the same days as the official. I do keep track of planned trades and target entry dates, so sometimes I'll already be in the trade prior to the official, but in most cases I enter later. Calendar entry is based on either RV well below average to enter early, or time based when the RV hits the inflection date for the slope of the RV rise starting to increase. Ideally you can find trades with both, but especially in times when we are seeing some bigger market move days, my preference is to enter when the daily RV increase is greatest (so the trade can show gains quicker). If I do enter early at RV well below average, I'm more prone to exit at an smaller gain and then look to re-enter if RV drops back down or when the RV chart is in the time period of bigger daily increase. @Yowster

We had quite a few topics discussing similar issues. Here are couple topics I recommend reading: Best Practices/Tools Last 2 months Performance (your topic actually where you got some very advice). To address your points: 1) We recently started tracking trades where members could get a [BETTER PRICING] than the official trade, on entry, exit or both. Please take a look at this list - this is from the last few weeks alone and not a full list. 2) As I mentioned on several occasions, I believe that looking at SO subscription cost (or the cost of any tool or course) as percentage of your account is a mistake. You invest in your trading education. You invest in your future. You expect that what you learn will help you to improve your trading and your profitability going forward. In the same way as people who pay $5-10k for educational course or mentoring program don't expect an immediate return on their investment. 3) This is related to 2) I'm sure nobody expects to become proficient in any area in life in 4 months (engineering takes 4 years to study). It's a process that takes years not months. In no way I'm comparing SO to what is offered at University, I'm just comparing the time it takes to become proficient in any area. 4) Yes, it is difficult and it takes time. If it wasn't, millions of people would become very rich very quickly. But again, why would it be different from any other area in life? To answer your question more specifically: I don't think you doing anything wrong. Just give it more time, and don't forget that those are very challenging and uncertain times, and even much more experienced traders struggle (just to remind you that July was our first losing month since last June). Add some inevitable mistakes you will make trading new strategies (this is why we recommend starting with paper trading) - and here is your answer

One thing I've noticed over last few days of searching for alternatives to IB due to better pricing: if you want to be able to trade basically any instrument in the same account as a retail trader, IB still seems to be the best option at this point. Tasty works has limited futures contracts and most brokers that offer more extensive futures trading require a separate account (like ToS, etrade, etc). I would be interested to hear about alternatives if anyone knows of any

@greenspan76 Are you trading live? I'm paper trading and I was perplexed by your question of how you got better pricing than I did and I traded in your time frame. IB told me that live accounts get executed first over paper accounts. Whew! that explains a lot.

I like LVX but it took some time. It comes with little guidance on how to use it. Coming from TOS you will miss some of the features of the Analyze tab if you use it to test strategies and adjustments over time by locking the price on spreads. In LVX there is no "memory" of the intraday spread price so you'll have to jot it down or use another software package (even TOS if you still have it). You can get EOD prices on all options for backtesting however. There is a pseudo-ticket charge that comes about as a minimum charge of $1.50 per leg which is annoying for single contract orders. I'm agnostic on brokerage platforms, but here are my opinions: Main benefits of LiveVol is: 1) Lower commissions than IB with all the benefits of IB (you can even use TWS if you like), even better pricing available if you belong to certain education services. 2) Very lean and fast interface built on Adobe Air (compared to TOS, TWS, or Tradestation) 3) Charting of realized and implied volatility across multiple timeframes is second to none. 4) Near limitless search capabilities for order flow, IV, RV, term structure, etc, 5) Very good support through live chat right in the application (like TOS). Drawbacks I can think of: 1) need minimum of $35k to fund an account, 2) Can't chart option prices over time, very annoying (need to use other software) 3) The software side was just bought by the CBOE and the brokerage side went to Lightspeed (so far no change besides letterhead but not sure what the ramifications of this will be in the long run), 4) might not be able available in all countries as IB, 5) No mobile app, need to use TWS mobile for trading on your phone/tablet. Cheers, Tim

Let me add my praise for IB's generally fast executions, and terrific commissions. IMO, these two facts alone make the slightly clunky TWS and Option Trader interface worth putting up with. And IB's new Probability Lab looks very worthwhile. Thanks Marco for your explanation of adding or removing liquidity and how that impact the comm. I now understand how it is I could receive a credit for a trade's commission, which has happened to me periodically. I have been pleased with my average comm for RUT, consistently low (using SMART routing), ranging from 0.19c to a high of 0.79c, but mostly below 0.50c. Considering SPX comms average around $1.20, this makes RUT part of my portfolio mix, every week (and I like their Thursday expiries as well). btw, when I inquired of IB about commission breaks, they told me that once you hit about a $1,000 a month in comm, you can get a better pricing structure (details on the site of course), so there is definitely a better price structure for very active traders. Hard to believe IB's comms could get better than their standard pricing tier, but apparently true.